A business customer support service center provides assistance with solving problems that a consumer or “enduser” may have with a product or service purchased from that business. Because most consumer problems are often unique, customer support must accurately account for consumer information. Consumer information pertains to information relating to the products and services purchased by each consumer. For example, an accurate accounting of warranty information, potential product upgrades and recalls, and past consumer problems are some examples of important types of information needed by consumer support to provide optimal assistance.
With the continuing expansion of commerce conducted on the Internet, many business customer support centers provide consumer assistance through a network addressable device, i.e. a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or, commonly, a “website”. As shown in FIG. 2, a typical prior art website includes a support resources component and a database component linked with the support resources component. Typically, the support resources component includes support personnel skilled in public relations as well as in technical expertise of the product or service at issue. The database component includes enduser records including consumer information and libraries of detailed product or service specifications provided by the business.
Illustratively, consider a customer having a problem with their computer-based system, such as a printer at a desktop computer workstation. The customer requests assistance for the problem by accessing the network addressable device. The network addressable device is accessed through a browser connected to the workstation. The problem is received by the support resources component. Typically, in preparation for deriving a solution, the support resources component communicates with the consumer to distill key concepts associated with the problem. The support resources component often references the database component so as to derive an optimal solution for the printer problem.
Unfortunately, the process of distilling key concepts as well as referencing the database component is excessively labor and time intensive for the support resources component. It often requires a great effort for support resources to distill key concepts. One reason is that customers accessing the customer support center often lack the knowledge to identify technical problems associated with their computer-based system. Moreover, because problem requests are addressed in the order that they are received, support resources cannot invest too much time with one customer at the expense of others.
Thus, as a matter of saving cost, labor, and time, there is a need in the art for providing a system and method for expeditiously identifying errors associated with computer-based systems prior to forwarding that error problem for resolution thereof.